My grandmother Victoria and I both live in dreams.
On the surface, we don’t have a lot in common. I announced my atheism at 13 after Yom Kippur services; my relationship to Judaism hasn’t felt as straightforward as it is for other members of my family. Grandma didn’t like that I didn’t like going to synagogue. I was also a picky eater as a kid, often balking at the Iraqi stews she cooked every Sunday, which didn’t help bridge our differences.
But we do share one important trait: We live to dream of ourselves in different places. Our minds are often somewhere else entirely, playing out motions in other countries or apartments while physically existing in the present. She’s always been like this; to be honest, so have I. My grandmother has always lived with a sense of bemusement and slight confusion as to where she’s ended up. Lately she’s been dreaming even more, wrapped in the coils of dementia. My ADD and penchant for imagining encourage my dreams; I’m not confused about where I’m located or how I got there, but it’s still work for me to feel grounded.
My grandmother isn’t and has never been very tender. She’s often unhappy and has no filter, qualities that have understandably become more prevalent as her dementia progresses. But she knows what’s important to her: her family. She’s a tiny Iraqi woman from Baghdad with eight siblings who would now all be in their 90s and 100s, though no one knows their actual birthdays. Their Iraqi passports were taken after the Farhud in the 1950s, when the bulk of the Iraqi Jewish community fled persecution. Only a few are still living — both the Jewish enclave in Baghdad, which hovers in the single digits, and my grandmother’s siblings. Only four of the eight siblings are alive, which is still impressive. But they’re scattered to the winds: two in Australia, one in California, one in New York.
My grandmother has made it clear for the majority of her life that she’d rather be somewhere else. After the Farhud in Baghdad, her family fled to Sydney, where her siblings met spouses. My grandmother was brought to America to meet eligible Iraqi Jewish men, and was eventually placed with my grandfather. Together they raised a family — my mother and my uncle — in Long Island; my grandfather ran a textile shop in Queens. For my whole life, Grandma’s talked of her siblings, of Sydney, of Baghdad. It’s where she always wanted to be: Sydney. She stayed in New York out of duty for her husband and kids.
My grandmother repeats the same refrain: “From Baghdad to Australia. Can you imagine?” When she and her family traveled in the 50s, they wondered what amenities they could expect wherever they landed. My grandmother has always told us the questions her family genuinely wondered as they prepared for the trip, in the days before the internet and fast(er) travel. Did they have bathrooms in Australia? What languages did they speak? What aspects of their lives in Baghdad could they replicate in Sydney? The cross-continental trek is one of the tried and true journeys our forebears took. In the time it takes today to fly to Sydney from Iraq, a mayfly completes its life cycle. In the 50s, the entire family traveled there by boat, entirely unsure of what awaited them.
As I’ve generally stayed within a 500-mile radius of the place I was born, just north of New York City, I can’t claim to understand the dissociative shock of living somewhere so physically separate from the place I was reared. I can’t claim to understand being unable to return to the place of my birth, both physically and emotionally. It takes a bodily toll. Of course, this diaspora is very common with Jews; the historic cliché of wandering, of feeling unlinked to place, of being unable to return to somewhere that might be war-torn or modernized. My relationship to Judaism doesn’t link to any specific place, unless you’re counting bagel places. My Judaism is focused instead around my family. Including my grandmother.
I struggle with anxiety and depression, diagnoses which both give me resiliency and feelings of being lost. In my darkest moments, I work to ground myself, thinking of place, focusing on sensory details. My mind mostly dwells on the serenity of islands and ocean in Maine in these instances. My family spent a few weeks in the same rented cottage each summer that I was growing up, so it’s a safe and sacred place for me. The smell of seaweed, the waft of wildflowers, the feeling of the rocky beach underfoot. It’s not the only place I mentally visit in times of anxiety and depression; sometimes I’ll place myself in a lake in Vermont, or sitting in the Jardins du Luxembourg in Paris. The important thing is I can use my mind to travel somewhere that feels better than where I’m actually located.
My grandmother has been struggling over the past few years, as people often do when they lose agency over their bodies in old age. Physically, she’s quite fit, though very fragile, which must make her lack of agency even more frustrating. When I visit her in her assisted living facility, where she’s not very happy, there’s an overwhelm of place about her. My grandmother is evidently from somewhere else, though it’s hard to know where — Sydney? Baghdad? New York? She’s not sure herself. But you can tell she’s far away from the places she loves, and can palpably feel her transporting herself there in her mind.
She talks about Baghdad and Sydney constantly; of sleeping under the stars in Baghdad, of the French lycée she attended for school, of carting mattresses from Iraq to Australia on the ship. It’s understandable that dementia puts her in places that are so ingrained within her; how dissonant it must be for her to realize how physically far she is from the places she wants to be.
Her places, like my places, are anchors. They’re balms, they’re definition, they’re sites of truth. In this way, my grandmother and I are linked, perhaps more deeply than I’ve ever allowed.
I’ve imbued as much Maine as I can into my apartment, from posters of Acadia to pouches of balsam. My friends know that anytime we drive anywhere outside of the city, I’ll quasi-jokingly suggest we just keep driving to end up in Maine. The solidity of its existence — Maine is there! — is always a quick reminder of peace, assuaging my anxiety. Unlike my grandmother, I’m able to travel to the place I daydream about. I think people make it out to be easier than it is to live in different places, even if we technically could make the move. Sometimes, we live out of necessity: allegiance to workplaces, partners, snagging a great deal on rent or needing proximity to family.
Who would my grandmother be if she’d had the chance to live her life in the place she wanted? Baghdad and Sydney mean my grandmother’s parents and siblings, all together, and all alive. That’s all my grandmother wants. Who would I be if I lived in the state I’ve idealized? Maine means ocean, my family, my childhood, peace.
Grandma and I dream ourselves in places of our youth, of our people, sometimes — often — enjoying it more than reality. In the assisted living facility, when I visit her, I think of her in the places she loves, with the people she loves, in alternate realities that tragically don’t exist anymore. That’s where her truest essence lies, and where, as a fellow dreamer, I most understand her.
